by Michel Faber
I dialled, she answered.
‘Hi, this is Mike,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Mike.’
‘Who? Speak louder, there’s a lot of noise around.’
‘It’s Mike!’ I barked. ‘From work!’
‘Oh. Hi.’ She sounded testy, as if I’d woken her up in the middle of the night or interrupted her five seconds before orgasm. (Now why did I think of that? I never thought about things like that in the Tunnel of Love.)
‘Listen, I really enjoyed talking to you today. It was the best conversation I’ve had in years. I didn’t want it to end. I still don’t.’ I could have gone on for a bit longer, but I left it there, hoping she would break the uncomfortable silence with an invitation.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘what am I supposed to do about it now? Whatever you want, can’t it wait until we see each other?’
‘Well, it’s just that I was thinking about you right now – I mean, tonight.’
‘Fine, that’s very interesting. Come and see me at work and we’ll discuss it, OK?’
And she hung up.
Next day I couldn’t bring myself to discuss the incident with her, so we talked about other things, in a friendly, even playful way, and I contented myself with that. I found Karen no less attractive than before, but now I had to remind myself that she wasn’t a simple deal, that there was more to her than met the eye. Like a character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, she wasn’t going to behave the way I’d expect her to, and would keep me guessing. But she only had to smile, showing off those eccentric teeth of hers, or shrug, calling attention to her finely shaped shoulders, for me to be charmed.
Good though our conversations were, I did find Karen rather difficult to challenge, though. Everything she said was either invincibly logical or so intensely felt it was dangerous – or both. To disagree with her was to risk either looking foolish or offending her irreparably. In fact, I already felt I must be offending her often, for she had a way of just walking off when a conversation had gone as far as she wanted it to go, and anything I might add as she was walking away she would ignore as if she hadn’t heard it.
And yet, in other ways, she was unusually easy-going and even suggestible. If I said I wanted to have a Chinese meal, she would stop what she was doing and say, ‘Sure.’ If I changed my mind half-way to the restaurant and said I wanted Italian instead, she would shrug and say, ‘Fine with me.’ If the Italian place proved to be shut and there was only enough time left to buy a stale doughnut from a snack bar, she would grin and say, ‘Never mind.’ Though she had the air of someone who is cynical about everyone and everything, she didn’t seem to have any need to lay blame. Even the Tunnel of Love’s bookshop she ran with the same tolerance that a farmer who has come to loathe pigs runs a piggery. Customers who were bamboozled by the hundreds of shrink-wrapped, unperusable magazines on display would ask her what made an $11.95 one different from a $24.95 one. ‘Colour quality,’ she would reply, or, ‘Better grade of paper.’ When accepting money, she would always say, ‘Thanks,’ or even ‘Have a nice day.’
One day when I happened to be there, she sold a grotesquely overweight, slightly mongoloid-looking man a magazine emblazoned BIG BLACK SLUTS BEG FOR IT.
‘This must set some new standard for politically incorrect transactions,’ I quipped when he was gone.
Karen shrugged. ‘He’s not going to rape anybody,’ she said. ‘He’s probably got a job as a crate-unloader at the back of a supermarket or something. Almost embraced a woman back in 1992 but lost his nerve. Gets ordered around by the checkout girls.’
‘All the same—’ I began.
‘Look,’ she said warningly, ‘in the feminist bookshop, I once sold a book called Life in the New Clear Age to a woman with a couple of black eyes so bad she looked like a panda. The book was all about sensitive, artistic people living in communes of seven to eleven members, caring for each other in a semi-rural environment, taking turns to work. Of course I knew perfectly well that the woman who bought this book was probably living in a mortgaged slum with her abusive husband and a kid who’s hassling her to buy him a commando video game. There’s no way this woman was going to use this book to make any changes in her life whatsoever. She was just going to … wank all over it. If I was going to worry about “politically incorrect”, I would have worried about it then.’
Brave words, sharp thoughts, but still something didn’t quite add up. I sensed there were times when the job did get to her after all, and at the end of the day she would look drained of everything except tears as she emptied the cash register.
‘What’s the matter?’ I dared to say on one of these occasions.
‘Scumbag overdose,’ she sighed.
Desperate to get closer to her, I asked her about her childhood. It’s funny, but asking people about their childhood is often an irreversible move towards sexual intimacy, much more so than talking about sex. In my horny bachelor years before my marriage and divorce, I found that I could discuss multiple orgasm with a woman over drinks and at the end of the evening she could still look at her watch and say she had the 10.37 to catch, but if I could get her reminiscing about the long-lost family home or looking for the old photograph album, it was almost a sure thing we’d end up in bed.
So, I asked Karen about her childhood. She responded promptly and at some length, but it was only afterwards that I realised she hadn’t actually told me anything about her parents or her past, and instead had steered the conversation to one of her pet subjects.
‘You know,’ she mused, ‘one of the hardest things for me to cope with when I was a kid was that all the characters in my favourite children’s books were male.’
We were talking in the corridor near the cubicles, and Karen was trying to persuade the cigarette machine to surrender a pack of Marlboro Lights.
‘I didn’t go for Cinderella and all that. It was too obviously make-believe. I liked to think that somewhere, the things that happened in books were really going on. I loved The Black Stallion, Catweazle, the Winnie the Pooh books when I was younger, and especially The Wind in the Willows – all that enchanted forest, wild wood, riverbank kind of stuff.’
She jabbed the machine’s buttons in what she hoped was just the right, not too rough, not too gentle way, and stepped back, her black hair defined sharply against a yellowed advertisement for Cocksucking Co-eds.
‘I would have given anything to be Ratty or Mole, or even Eeyore, you know. They were just so there.’
‘There?’
‘They never had to justify their existence. Everybody accepted them for who they were. They had a space that was just naturally theirs, they didn’t need to hustle for it, and they were free to be happy, or miserable, a loner, a party animal, whatever they liked.’
‘What about the stories with female characters in them?’
‘I never liked them as much. As soon as there are females, things get tense. Everybody in the story has a much harder time, especially the females. Have you noticed that? It’s weird.’
I hadn’t noticed. It sounded like the premise behind a lit. crit. thesis, the sort that Karen herself might have written.
‘I think,’ she went on, ‘one of the main reasons I learned to read and write was so I could make up my own Wind in the Willows stories, with my favourite characters turned female. I’d print them very neatly on paper the same size as a real book, and I’d do drawings. It was, like, “Ratty woke up one morning knowing she simply must go exploring” – that sort of thing.’
‘It’s a wonder you didn’t grow up to be a writer of children’s books.’
A flash of pain reshaped Karen’s face: innocently, I had touched a nerve. Too late, I knew we had achieved the intimacy I’d hoped for, but that it was gone now. Ripping the cellophane off her new packet of cigarettes, Karen scowled, ‘There’s no point writing children’s books anymore. There aren’t any children left to read them. Little girls are worrying about whether their tits are big enough
. If there was such a place as the Wild Wood, they’d use it to lose their virginity in.’
She stumped off with her cigarettes. The conversation was over.
Afterwards, she was cooler towards me, more distant. It was as if we’d been to bed together and she considered it a mistake. I hung around the bookshop whenever I could, hoping things would get better, but I only ended up learning something that put rather a big dampener on any plans I might have had for our lives together.
One afternoon a gay customer said to her, ‘Darren’s got the latest issue of Hot X Buns laid aside for me.’
‘I can’t see it,’ said Karen, rummaging under the counter.
‘He definitely told me it would be here. And I need it by Wednesday. I’m flying to New Zealand Wednesday afternoon.’
‘I’ll see Darren tonight,’ said Karen, ‘and ask him about it.If not tonight, I’ll definitely see him in the morning before I leave for work.’
‘So,’ I said when the man was gone, ‘is Darren staying with you just now?’
‘You might say that. We live together.’
‘Just good friends?’
‘Very good friends. We’ve lived together for eight years. In actual fact, we’re thinking of getting married.’
‘Ha ha,’ I smirked, sweat breaking out everywhere.
‘No, seriously,’ she insisted. ‘It would make a lot of things much easier – bureaucratically, socially. I think I could go on just living with Darren for ever; he understands me. But there are certain things marriage comes in useful for … home loans … prospects overseas … children …’
‘Children? With Darren?’ By this time I was wondering how I could sit down in a hurry without it being obvious I needed to sit down in a hurry.
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Homosexual men make good fathers. Good fathers are hard to find. We’ll see.’
I didn’t sit down after all, I walked away. I couldn’t recall ever being hurt so much by something a woman had said to me, not even during my divorce. I went outside and spruiked for all I was worth, roping them in with a cajoling good humour and merciless eye-contact.
‘Yeah, come on, bring your girlfriend too, yes, come on love, don’t be shy, this is the nineties, you’re a big grown-up girl.’
The next couple of days weren’t easy for me, but, funnily enough, I noticed that Karen was much warmer and friendlier again, now that she had told me about her plans for the future. She thought I looked unwell, was worried I wasn’t eating properly, wanted to go out to lunch with me. She was willing to argue as animatedly as ever, but there was a queer new affection there, a protectiveness. Glad of the opportunity to spend more time with her, I followed her on to a train on the way home, and she let me follow.
‘Everything’s much cruder nowadays,’ she was saying, ‘than people like you would like to think.’ (She was talking about books again, and how the time for them was long past.) ‘People communicate on a much more basic level. There’s no use for the written word anymore except as padding for sexy pictures.’
‘What about letters?’
‘You mean like A, B, C …?’
‘No, no: letters that you write to people.’
‘I don’t write letters to people. Who needs letters? The only important things happen face to face, eyeball to eyeball. You can write to someone for ten years and then when you finally meet them face to face, in five minutes you realise the relationship’s a non-starter. The fact that you filled them in on all the trivia for the past ten years makes no difference.’
‘You don’t have to write about trivia. You can write about your feelings.’
‘Letters don’t contain feelings. They contain ink. Do you know how many women have written long, articulate letters to a guy saying it’s all over, and then the next time they set eyes on him they smack together like magnets!’
‘So you believe the only way people can understand one another is by talking face to face?’
‘No, that’s bullshit as well! What really goes on is even cruder than that. Language is just a way of keeping people’s attention. If you don’t keep talking, they stop looking at you, and if they stop looking at you, you can’t make them do what you want.’
‘Karen, Karen,’ I said, shaking my head in bemusement, ‘I’m the advertising man. I’m supposed to be the cynical one.’
She pulled a face, and unexpectedly removed her jumper, yanking it up over her head in a single irritated motion. When I say ‘unexpectedly’, I have to admit it was a stinking hot afternoon and the train carriage was jostling with peak-hour passengers radiating extra body heat; I was sweating too in my spruiking jacket. Karen’s action was unexpected only in the sense that I had never seen her wearing just a bra before. Maybe it wasn’t a bra, maybe it was some kind of fashion garment with a similar design to a bra: I couldn’t tell, except that it wasn’t see-through, and no one on the train seemed to think she had done anything outrageous. Me, I was electrified. Months of constant exposure to explicit sex acts and the naked flesh of strangers had not prepared me for the shock of Karen’s soft bare shoulders, her bare midriff with its downy, sweat-sheened belly rising and falling under the ribs.
‘Just look at the people on this train,’ she was saying. ‘There’s too much noise for you to hear any of them in particular, but you can easily tell what they really want from each other. That toddler’ (she was pointing, so I had to take my eyes off her glistening skin) ‘is crying because his parents won’t do something he wants. Who needs to know what it is? It’s not important. Maybe he’s upset because they won’t let him keep throwing his toy on the floor. It doesn’t matter. He’s not really upset about the toy, or about the weather, or his shoes, or going to the zoo or not going to the zoo. What he’s really saying is, “I am God and if I’m not feeling perfectly happy every second there must be something badly wrong with the universe, so you’d better fix it up right now or I’ll destroy you.” And those teenage girls huddled together over there – they’re probably talking about how somebody behaved at a party, or whether a certain guy is cool or gross. The details are irrelevant. They won’t remember any of it a year from now. The essence of what they’re saying is, “Hey, you’re my girlfriend, I’m your girlfriend, and here we are, onthis train, having good times together.” And that old pair of drinking buddies over there – see them? – they’re saying to each other, “Life’s been a bastard to me and as a result I’m a loser, but I know I can rely on you to show me a bit of respect because you’re even more of a no-hoper than I am.” You see? That’s what it comes down to – it’s that crude.’
‘And us?’ I enquired, blushing. ‘What do you think we’re really saying to each other?’
She turned away then, and blushed herself, though of course there was no way of telling whether it was in defeat at having to admit our conversation was too complex and meaningful to dismiss generically, or in embarrassment at the generic crudity of our attraction to each other.
‘This is my stop,’ she announced, as the train slowed into a station. ‘Bye.’
Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We’d like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on given occasions, and we never have respectable reasons for anything until we have to make them up afterwards for the benefit of our curious friends. A cynic once said that people fall in love with somebody liking them. Was that what I found so loveable about Karen, that she liked me? Of course, there was no forgetting that she’d treated me very coldly at times, especially on the phone – which only made me all the more fascinated. Maybe that was explained by a different theory of love: that we’re fascinated by the challenge of hostility, and strive to persuade the unwilling lover’s eyes to focus
on us and twinkle their approval. Then again, perhaps it was Karen’s body that was attracting me? There was no denying I was charmed by the beauty of her breasts as they shifted about gently under her favourite grey sweater, or that a subtle hint of her nipples through a T-shirt excited me more than the erect and naked ones all around us. On the walls of the bookshop was displayed, from every angle and in every imaginable state of protrusion and lubrication, the hole that Karen, too, must have between her legs, yet to me it was a mystery as potent as the afterlife.
I was less nervous with her than I’d been with women in the past, in that I felt no need to dress better, or practise looking self-assured in the mirror, or agonise over my choice of aftershave. Did this mean Karen meant more to me than they had, or less? Perhaps the casualness of her own dress and grooming was making me feel more relaxed. Now that summer was here and she wore lighter clothing, I noticed she didn’t even shave her armpits.
‘A legacy from your days in the feminist bookshop?’ I teased.
‘A legacy from a terrible rash caused by roll-on antiperspirant,’ she pouted mischievously. That pout immediately entered the legend of her attraction, and lent the underarm hair, by association, a quirky expressiveness. After that, all underarm hair I saw reminded me of hers.
‘I think I’ve fallen in love,’ I confessed to Mandy. ‘I don’t suppose you think there’s such a thing.’
‘Sure I do,’ she said dreamily. Then, after a pause, ‘Not in this world, though.’
‘You mean, in the sex industry?’
‘No, planet Earth,’ she replied, still dreamily. I noticed her pupils were dilated by recent heroin infusion: she really did look like an alien with phony contact lenses for eyes.
Deep down I knew that the only appropriate person to discuss this with was Karen herself, but that was difficult, because I was overwhelmed by her presence at work, couldn’t write to her, given what she’d said about letters, and couldn’t ring her because of her incredibly off-putting phone manner.